Can AI Really Document my Data Estate?

Live sessionSept 1011 AM ET

AI-written documentation isn't supposed to survive a domain expert's review. 200+ customers proved otherwise — 2M+ descriptions generated,
210,000+ hours saved.

THE SESSION

What you'll take away

What AI actually changes about cataloging and governance. And how the team at Mastercard lived it.

Keynote

Is Traditional Data Cataloging Dead?

What actually changes about cataloging and governance once AI can document a data estate faster than any team could by hand.
How data teams are structuring around it, now that documentation isn't the bottleneck.
Why this is critical to see success in AI programs.

Prukalpa SankarCo-Founder

Deep Dive

The Mastercard Deep Dive

Learn what it actually took for AI-generated documentation to meet the standard of the people who own the data. Not a proof of concept. A production rollout inside a heavily regulated financial services data estate, reviewed and signed off by the domain experts who had to live with it.

The Premise: When AI-generated context works. Why it's viable now, and the line between enrichment your business will trust and enrichment that won't survive review.
The Build: Mastercard's approach. A controlled scope first, stakeholders brought along early, and a team shifting from writing documentation to reviewing it.
The Outcome: What changes for the team. A data estate AI agents can use, and a team doing judgment work instead of documentation work.

Zhenni HuManager, Data Management

Meet the Speakers

Prukalpa Sankar

Co-Founder

Prukalpa co-founded Atlan with a thesis that went on to define the third generation of data catalogs. She's now building the context platform — arguably one of the most consequential technologies for unlocking real economic value from AI.

Zhenni Hu

Manager, Data Management

Zhenni leads data management at Mastercard, where her team put AI-generated documentation in front of domain experts and made it stick.

Nandini Tyagi

Strategic Initiatives Lead

Nandini leads strategic initiatives at Atlan, working with data leaders on how AI changes data cataloging and governance.

In their words

What data leaders saw after the first review

“We were stunned and perplexed by the quality of the content. How could the agents create such high-quality context from lineage, SQL, and dbt logic?”
Kenneth JebjergHead of Data Engineering, Baader
“The output shifted from solid generic descriptions to something that felt like it had been written by someone who understands our business.”
Izabela WilczynskaData Governance Manager, PayU
“I expected boilerplate, instead it inferred business context I never explicitly provided, correctly describing how an asset fit into our customer journey just from column names and lineage. That’s when I realized this was knowledge synthesis, not just documentation.”
Swatilekha SahaData Architect, DAT Freight & Analytics
“Without this context we would have spent months/years manually updating the metadata required for these efforts and would not let us move at the speed we can now.”
Bernie DaleyDirector of Data Management, Nelnet Servicing, LLC
“Before we started, 3% of our data estate had a description. It’s now over 92%. I’d gone in expecting to correct most of what came out. I ended up mostly just checking it.”
Greg GasparData Governance, The Bancorp
“Before you spend another sprint tuning prompts, check whether your agent has any way of knowing what your data means. Ours didn’t. By the end of the sprint we’d enriched 1,220 assets and the quality on the ones I could personally vet held up better than I expected. Two weeks moved that further than I thought possible.”
Eshwar VijayAI Solutions Architect, Coupa
“It did exactly what we needed. That sounds unremarkable until you’ve run an AI pilot. Most get you close to the goal, then eat a quarter in rework and stakeholder hand-holding. This one didn’t.”
Rodolfo RamirezData Management, Workday
“My assumption was that AI-generated documentation would be helpful, but still require significant human intervention. Instead, I found myself thinking less about documentation and more about a larger shift: context is becoming a strategic asset.”
David NishimuraProduct & Program Leader, Itau Unibanco
“Once we showed this to our BI team, you could see the attitude shift, from ‘another tool, more work’ to excited to get in and start looking around. The instant value just changed everything.”
Sayali AvalakkiBI & Analytics Lead, Brightspeed